Joyce Mansour “The Strange Lady”
Joyce Mansour, Wandering Spirals and other unpublished parallels in the labyrinth. Texts collected and presented by Laure Missir. Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2019, 339 p., 27 E.
Joyce Mansour remains the poet of overflow, of fragmentation to experience what passes and happens in the body and in the breath. From the Jewish tradition where she comes from, there probably remains only the body of the letter, its skeleton of the consonant alphabet so that the verb gives birth from the body.
For Mansour it’s all about breaking everything under “a steel heel”, “disembowelling the actors, uprooting the dead, swallowing, spitting, chewing, ejaculating”. At eelle la mort tambourine but in a white-hot desert the hammering of verbs punctuates out of conjugation.
The poetess overturns her anguish of death by the force of eroticism, irony and self-mockery. Eroticism is for her a return to violence, transgression and a process linked to action.
It is therefore all the more disconcerting that language, to put it mildly, decompartmentalizes the points of reference: “even dead I will return to fornicate in the world”, says the humorous woman who creates an autobiography “between bed and dream” but far from “sleep bogging down”, and this from one word to another, in “a road parallel to the one that does not exist”. Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Joyce Mansour, Wandering Spirals and other unpublished parallels in the labyrinth. Texts collected and presented by Laure Missir. Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2019, 339 p., 27 €.
Be the first to comment